Moosicles

My friend and I are working a creating a web application and we have been looking at domain names for it – one of them being spotplot.com. We looked it up and it was inconveniently parked. We decided it might be worth purchasing it, so I emailed the guy that owned it and asked how much he would be willing to sell it for. Here is our conversation:

Me: I see that you have spotplot.com parked. Would you be willing to sell it, and if so, for how much

Him: I am asking $6,000 for the spotplot.com domain.

Me: Alright, sorry, I don’t buy into the domain parking bullshit. That is ridiculous.

So it shows. I hate domain parking, because I hate bullshit, and domain parking is nothing but a bullshit scheme to make money. If you don’t already know, domain parking is where a person, or often a “firm” will purchase hundreds of thousands of domains for less than a dollar to $10 a domain. They will then do absolutely nothing with those domains except for put advertisements on them or just let them sit there. When someone wants to buy one of those domains and create a legitimate website out of one, they attempt to charge thousands of dollars for something they payed only a few bucks for.

This article at the “Daily Domainer” provides a top “domainer” bragging about how his “firm” makes $20 million a year for providing absolutely nothing useful for society:

I thought, it can’t be that easy. So I talked to some domainers, and they said, ‘We own 300,000 domains, we make $20 million a year, we have just four employees and some servers in the Caymans.

Really? You brag about that? This is where I start to lose hope in society. This is where capitalism falls apart. People are out there, looking for profits, not even concerned with whether or not they are doing good for society. So here are my ending points:

1. If you are a domain parker, go jump off a bridge.
2. If you are a web developer, don’t put up with this bullshit.
3. The government should step in and regulate.

I am writing thoughts in response to this article that was published on BBC.

There needs to be a consensus on the purpose that government has in order for us to better define objectives. This article brings up the idea of overall happiness for the largest amount of people. I cannot help but agree. Spin egalitarianism into this and it is evident that there is no reason to allow a minuscule minority to become excessively rich while a larger minority suffers; the rich won’t be any happier than the moderate-income group. But if we reinvest in educating and teaching the poorest how to help themselves, we might be able to maintain a happier overall population.

It’s about time that the United States grows up. The endless fight between liberals and conservatives is insane; it’s as if we are a bunch of small children arguing over who gets to ride in the front seat or who gets to be “it” in a game of tag. Much of Europe is moving on; they have higher life-satisfaction rates according to Satisfaction with Life Index, and the World Database of Happiness. They are far more environmentally conscious, and they have realized that the fear of communism, socialism, and dictators is irrational. A country like Iraq, Iran, or Cuba has perfectly acceptable, rational reason to worry about government power getting out of hand. The United States has no reason to fear too much government power. The United States, however, has every reason to fear corporate power getting out of hand. So many people jump on leaders in the United States for being “socialist.” I ask you, so what? I tell you, grow up. The most successful nations in their most successful years became so by maintaining a good balance between government regulation and private resource management. People had just the right amount of personal freedom to feel comfortable, yet enough guidance to feel that the country is being taken care of in good hands. The United States prospered after World War II because the government stood up and took a stand. It was not a pussy as it tends to be now. It was not afraid to take action.

Mature up, study sociology, study capitalism, study socialism, study economics, study environmental science, study politics, philosophize a bit, read some statistics, and then take action.

We need to start changing our society… the way it is organized politically, the way it operates, and the way it is viewed. We need to morph our culture into a more open-minded, wiser, optimistic, and active culture.

We need to stop putting up with bullshit and fix our problems:

• Obesity and Starvation (the fact that we have both of these simultaneously is nauseating),
• Global Warming,
• Pollution,
• Oil Dependency,
• Moral Disagreements (Abortion, Death Penalty…),
• Automobile Dependency,
• Lack of Education,
• Polarization of social classes…

And the list could go on for pages. I think the best solution to a problem tends to be the most passive solution. For pollution, global warming, and oil dependency, I think we need to cut down on travel. Yes, the world is globalized now. We have the mindset that just because we live in America doesn’t mean we have to manufacture our products here and grow our food here. This is very true; we don’t have to. The reality is that it is far more economically feasible and efficient to do what you are good at. The US may be good at designing electronics, and China may be good at manufacturing them, so we trade. Maybe Brazil is good at growing Soy and we are good at growing Wheat, so we trade. This is a good idea, and it makes things cheaper. But there is a problem with this: we have to spend a ton of oil (and therefore money) and shipping these things back and fourth. This creates pollution and global warming, it fills our oceans with boats, and it fills our roads with traffic.

The same idea applies on the local level. Perhaps we want to put our businesses in one location and our houses in another so that we can live in peace and quiet when we want to, and focus on work when we want to. Again, this clogs the road with cars, it uses fuels, costs money, creates pollution, and causes us to be dependent on energy – whether it petroleum or some other form to power electric cars. Either way, it requires energy. The most obvious solution in my mind is to stop separating everything. If we can mix things up so that we can walk to as many places as possible, then we will alleviate many of these problems. Not only will we have to spend less money on gas, have cleaner air, spend less time commuting, spend less money financing the Middle East, stop contributing as much to global warming, and but we will also be fixing the problem passively. We don’t have to build some new technology to do this. We just have to change the way we organize our cities. [Read about New Pedestrianism.]

The food and manufacturing problem mentioned above can be fixed in a similar way. Yes, maybe it is cheaper to grow food and manufacture it in another country, but it is cleaner, simpler, and more environmentally friendly to grow it close to where we live. Then there is the fact that we have many times more control over local resources. It is difficult to control a multinational corporation than it is to simply boycott one local farmer if he does something you disagree with. It’s easy to keep track of a local company or corporation and hold them accountable. For this, I want to see us investing and researching in vertical farming [Read about Vertical Farming], urban community gardens, and buying local. We gain something back that our civilization has been steadily loosing when we go local: a sense of community. Nowadays cars and the internet have destroyed our sense of community. To actually know the people we live near and to form a strong local culture does not happen anymore. When a local culture does form, it is never a strong one.

And in regard to how we handle the ugly realities of human civilization: It is so easy and natural to simply distance ourselves from what we do not like; but this is such a fundamental problem that America has, and it never helps in the long run. You could even argue that the reason most of the European settlers migrated to America in the first place was to escape problems rather than to fix them. Overpopulation, economic, and religious problems in Europe pushed people to the Americas. When you can run, why should you fight? But now, we are here, and we have our problems. We need to stop running from them. Let me give you some modern examples of the same old behavior: we put our power plants far away from our cities, we put our paper mills and stinky, polluting factories where we don’t have to see them or smell them, we put our houses as far away from the smelly, crime-infested downtowns that we have [Read about Gentrification.], and we put our landfills and junkyards on the outskirts of cities. Let me point out that while this makes life pleasant for us in the now, it distances us from the fact that we have crime, pollution, and an excess of physical waste.We need to re-focus our efforts on fixing our problems rather than running from them. If the power plant is too disgusting to live next to, then maybe we ought to use a different type of power plant and not use so much energy. If the highway is too loud and crowded to put a house next to, then maybe we should not spread out so far that we need to have highways going all over our cities. If our landfills are so big and smelly, maybe we should compost more and not waste so much material. You get the idea. I’m not trying to say we should go out and literally move each of these undesirable necessities into our backyards, but I am saying we need to start making political policies that encourage us to face our problems, not run from them. We need to stop putting up with bullshit and speak up.

With a rising population and a falling amount of available resources available to us, we are more or less screwed if we continue operating society the way we are now. Sure, maybe we would be okay for as much as fifty more years this way, but I assure you that we will begin to feel the effects of our mismanaged resource use eventually. And fifty – or even 100 years from now is not much. The Middle Ages were just one of many periods throughout history and they lasted a millennium. We entered a new historical period in the mid-19^th century, and we are still at the front end of this period. We must not think only a few years ahead as we are now – we must look out for our long-term survival. We must believe that we can and will last for many historical periods to come. To all of those people that have lost hope in society: STOP IT! You are half the problem. Apathy and the idea that we cannot change is half the problem. The 1960’s was a revolutionary time when regular people changed our culture simply by making public speeches and starting grassroots movements. American history is filled with grassroots movements. The United States began as a grassroots movement. The US is beginning to fall behind; we are coming out of the recession more slowly than many other developed nations including China, and the reason is that we are having a hard time re-adjusting ourselves. We need not to be afraid to point to a problem and fix it, and stop getting stuck for years at a time on the minor details of how we will satisfy each person, organization, and corporation along the way.

One way that we can act out is by getting people involved. With modern technology and communications, why the hell are we still letting our politicians make so many of the decisions while half of their interest is simply in promoting their career like the next guy? We need to make improvements in the way we vote. We need to get more people to vote in the first place. We need to make our society more open and engaging. So many lower-class people are politically apathetic because they feel like they have no say in things. We need to stop putting up with their apathy and address it. Why are they apathetic? Why do they feel like they have no say in things? How can we get them involved? How can we get them interested in education? We need to stop forcing education on people that don’t want it and refocus our efforts on getting people interested in education so that they can take advantage of it if they want it. We need to address people’s alternative learning styles so that they can stop flipping burgers and help solve our problems.

Come on America, stop slacking off. We have 99 problems and no excuses not to fix them. We can start locally.

These are my experiences with FatCow.com after two weeks:

I launched Moosicles.com two weeks ago with FatCow.com. This is the second time I have ever purchased webhosting, so I knew a little bit more about what to look for than I did the first time around (I went with LunarPages.com the first time, see my review of them here.)

Reason For Choosing FatCow: The reason I picked FatCow, to be completely honest, is that it had the most user-friendly, attractive website out of any of the hosting sites I looked at. Part of my logic was that if I’m going to be wading through a website – control panel and all, I want it to look nice and I want to be able to find the buttons I need. That’s a fairly shallow reason, but the other side of this is that I figured if a web hosting company had the common sense to make a beautiful, user-friendly website, without advertisements all over it, they probably knew what they were doing and invested in their quality. My philosophy here worked: FatCow has been very good quality so far. I can find everything I need easily; the website does not have ads, and things just work.

The Deal: FatCow’s current deal includes unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, a free domain name, $50 of Adsense advertising credits, $25 of Yahoo advertising credits, and of course all of the basic features for $66 for the first year, $88 each year following.

Uptime/Speed: So far my website has not been down a single time that I have checked it, and it has never been slow. Not even once. I am actually surprised – webhosting companies don’t tend to be of good quality for less than $100 a month.

Support: The first time I submitted a support ticket, it was at 11:16PM to FatCow.com, and someone began to investigate this issue at 11:32PM. (Just 16 minutes later). By 12:59AM the entire ticket was resolved – about an hour and a half later. The second time I submitted a ticket a few hours before the Super Bowl, and by midnight later that Sunday night, it was resolved. The fact that they have a support crew working on a Sunday night during the Super Bowl and helping customers that are not even paying for the advanced support package is mind-blowing.

Quirks: They are 100% wind-powered. Some of their staff claim to ride bikes to work everyday. They offer great mini-support pages on things like how to connect to the MySQL server with PHP, how to enable a PHP session, etc. They know their customers well as they cater toward the PHP-coding crowd as well as the novice user that just installs Wordpress with no background in coding.

So far, I have nothing but good things to say about FatCow, we shall see if this holds true in the months ahead.

-Moose

I used LunarPages.com to host my previous website, StudyMachine.com. Here is my experience with them:

Reason For Choosing LunarPages: I chose LunarPages based on the facts that it had everything I needed, and it was cheap. After researching many websites, this was the cheapest I could find for the amount of bandwidth and storage they offered.

The Deal: The deal I got was a little over $50 a year for 100GB of bandwidth per month and 1000GB of storage. Somewhere along the way, they upgraded my account package to unlimited bandwidth and storage.

Uptime/Speed: Uptime was not bad; they did have their downtimes though – about once or twice a month the site would be down. Speed was a different story. They were VERY slow on a regular basis. They were also constantly updating and changing their webservers, which was not done gracefully. You knew exactly when they were changing out the servers.

Support: LunarPages had mediocre support when I needed it. I recall having to call their support line about four times over the course of using them, and they were not very understanding of my needs. Eventually, I did always get what I needed though.

Quirks: Somehow LunarPages managed to get listed at the Inc. 500 website; how though, I do not know. Perhaps it is simply because they are a large company.

Overall, LunarPages was not aweful, but they were far from satisfactory. It is worth paying slightly more ($20 or so more) per year for better quality hosting.

I logged into Digg via my Facebook account today for the first time, and it as a beautifully designed, simplistic-yet-useful website. I have heard of it before and seen it, but thought that was it was kind of stupid and pointless. I was wrong – it is actually a great resource for finding new websites. When you search Google, you get websites based on their relevance and their Page Rank (mainly based on how many people link to them). This is useful if you are looking for something specific, but not if you are trying to find out what is out there. Digg allows users to post completely new links and vote them up or down, meaning that the results you find tend to be of better quality and interest level than Google, if not as specific. Also, Digg allows sites that would be 50 pages deep in a Google search to become known.

This brings me to my main point: Digg is perfect for bloggers and webmasters to get their sites out there. I have only made two Digg posts, but I can already tell it is a wonderful tool because your site is immediately cast out along with other big-name sites and miscellaneous news posts. You suddenly have a chance, and an easy chance at that, to get good-quality traffic inflow. Unlike Ads, users don’t click on Digg posts by accident – they click on them because they searched for them or because they looked interesting. Additionally, Digg allows you to view other people’s blogs and websites and get ideas from them – Digg is a great 21st century tool to exchange internet pages.

There is a downside though: you must be a bit geeky. The non-geek will always lose at website publication; while even the average person has the mental capacity to create a web page, it takes a true geek to sit there and share links with others and click on other people’s websites just for the curiosity of it. Most people don’t have time to continuously post to Digg and other blogs.

Digg is a great alternative approach to getting good-quality traffic inflow for your website or blog.

1. He was afraid of failure.
2. He did tell anybody about his ideas.
3. He underestimated his ideas.
4. He was afraid to spend money.
5. He did not jump on that opportunity.
6. He was too shy to introduce himself and his idea.
7. He was worried about what others thought about him.
8. He did not know his own weaknesses.
9. He did not know his own strengths.
10. He procrastinated.
11. He was afraid someone would steal his idea.
12. He did not trust his business partner.
13. He trusted his business partner.
14. He did not plan ahead.
15. He spent too much time planning.
16. He did not have a buissness card, portfolio, or resume ready.
17. He clung to his current job.
18. He was afraid to take a break from school.
19. He did not step back and relax.
20. He did not keep in contact with his potential clients and buissness partners.

In 1998, Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google out of their garage. By 2004, it had already reached an estimated net worth of $23 billion. At the same time that Google was estimated at $23 billion, Harvard students Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes were busy launching Facebook, and within two weeks of the launch, many Boston schools were already using the site. Today, both Google and Facebook are known as some of the fastest growing companies and have net worths in the billions. Both businesses were started by average people with an idea – not the CEO of some existing company or rocket scientists.

In addition to Facebook, Google, and the lesser-known but still useful websites, all businesses must begin their entrepreneurial journey somewhere. This “somewhere”, in all cases, is a place deep inside the skull where a few rebellious but ingenious synapses fire to form an idea. Not all ideas are created equally however. Some ideas prove to be failures, others become instant successes, and yet others are insanely innovative ideas that never come together because their creators don’t recognize their beauty. These neglected ideas never reach their potential and their thinkers never reach the success that they deserve. Why?

Most of us entrepreneur-minded folk formulate ideas constantly. We often don’t even have time to write down our ideas because they come up in the middle of work, movies, books, or conversations. These inconvenient situations cause us to say “I’ll try to remember it and think about it later.” Usually by the time we sit down and try to remember the idea, the light bulb in our minds is burnt out and our inspiration is lost. The ideas are still just as good as they were when the thoughts that led to them were at hand, but we rarely recognize this though the lost inspiration.

With that said, there is a deep, itching need for a website or physical business that allows people to share ideas and critique them. A website of this sort would be best formatted like an online bulletin board, so that people could post a new idea and other entrepreneurs could reply with their own thoughts. Moderators could keep spam and insanity out of the picture. By allowing users to comment on each other’s ideas, they will not only receive criticism from other entrepreneurs, but they will get feedback from average, everyday people from all sorts of backgrounds and trades. They will find it far more useful to receive these ideas at the idea-formulating phase of entrepreneurship than once they have already begun the venture and started investing time and money.

The home page would have lists of the most popularly failed ideas and the most successful ideas, along with variations of such ideas, and the most recent ideas. Users would be able to vote for ideas and rate them. Ideas would exist as threads that are continuously being revised, updated, and reviewed. Comments would accumulate with accounts of first-hand experiences, giving users a wealth of examples and knowledge. This website would serve as a the first place an entrepreneur would go to further investigate his or her ideas.

In addition to average people with ideas, “Professional Reviewers” could eventually be added to analyze ideas for a reasonable cost and give feedback as to whether the ideas are viable or not. Such reviews would include financial information from the perspective of an accountant, legal advise from lawyers, and structural or mechanical advise from engineers if need be. The company quickly begins to resemble a business consulting firm of sorts – and perhaps it would become one. The unique quality of this website is that the business could serve individuals that are not sure if they even want to pursue their business seriously or not. This is no website for someone who knows what they want and knows it will work – it is a website for the person who continuously asks himself, “is this a good idea or not?”

Hopefully this service would also prevent people from wasting time on ideas for which there is simply no demand or that are not even close to economically feasible. My professor in Entrepreneurship Initiative once gave the class the example of a beer delivery service. She receives more business plans for such a company than any other type of business, yet not a single person has ever come up with a profitable scheme. There are always the problems of legal issues and the fact that people tend to be cheap about buying beer – especially near a university campus which the prime location for such a business – but perhaps such a website would allow would-be business failures to become aware of the obstacles they are about to encounter and overcome them as a group. Just as computer programmers and web developers have “code review” sessions where they sit around and review each other’s code, and just as writers and editors often have their own review sessions, entrepreneurs need a club to hang out in and review ideas. This website is that club.

The one and only major criticism to this website waiting to happen is that these business philosophers would be reluctant to share ideas in fear of the ideas being stolen and their credit lost. But this is an irrational fear. The first rule design students at any reputable university are often taught is to share their ideas with each other, and not to fear their idea being stolen. Any idea worth creating has likely already been thought of in some form, and most people do not steal ideas – the average entrepreneur has his own ambitions and interests, and will not have the disrespect to take another person’s idea. It is evident that the wisdom to be gained by the free exchange of ideas has already been demonstrated with democracy and open source software. So yes – people are hesitant to reveal their plans. This will make this website challenging, but not impossible. The key to solving this problem is maintain an open, positive, and respectful attitude within the forum. If a web developer can overcome entrepreneurs’ fears, there is no question that this website would become an instant success.

With so many failed businesses and ideas for new innovations floating around in the modern world, there is no reason for a young entrepreneur to fail at a plan that has already been failed at for the same reasons it has failed before. But just as there is no reason to repeat others’ mistakes when their failures have been so well documented, there is no reason to miss an opportunity for a spectacular idea because they didn’t recognize its potential.

-Moose